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Oct. 29th, 2003 05:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerMicrosoft have been unveiling their plans for the next version of Windows over the last few days - they look pretty exciting and seem to be nothing less than a complete revamp of the way that programmers will be accessing the internals of the OS. Everything from the windowing system (which will be using the latest 3D hardware to make things run smoother than ever before and provide a richer experiene, much like OS X does for the Mac) to the filing system (which will now have a database working with it, holding metadata on all of your files so that you can search for them in an instant and combine them in any way you choose) to the connectivity (all of the internal plumbing is being replaced, learning from their previous mistakes). Everything's moving to the Common Language Runtime (as used by all .NET languages) and it's the stated aim of several of the product groups to reduce the amount of work you have to do to produce a functional program by a third.
Of course, all of this has to wait for the next version (codename Longhorn) to ship - probably in late 2005/ early 2006, but according to people at the developers conference it's already looking fairly spectacular. The required specs are pretty high, and it looks like it'll take a couple of years for that level of hardware to be generally available. As a side note, as large amounts of the system will be written using the CLR, the whole system will be much more portable. With AMD and Intel going for different approaches to 64-bit chips, it looks like MS might manage to cut the chains tying them to one architecture with this one.
I've played with VS.NET a fair bit, and been rather impressed with it. As a programming environment it pretty much kicks all the other one's I've worked with into touch. The only problem I found was that because of the vast amount of power available, I felt like it was going to take me months (if not years) to become comfortable with a wide-enough range of the tools to know that I was using the right ones. I managed to make a start at using ADO/XML to store information before becoming completely mired in a lack of understanding of the basic principles of what I was supposed to be doing - all the documentation I've come across so far assumes that you were comfortable using previous versions of the MS systems.
The challenge, of course, is to find myself a position where I get to play with all of this at some point over the next couple of years. Time to start looking around to see which bits of the company will get to do this...
Of course, all of this has to wait for the next version (codename Longhorn) to ship - probably in late 2005/ early 2006, but according to people at the developers conference it's already looking fairly spectacular. The required specs are pretty high, and it looks like it'll take a couple of years for that level of hardware to be generally available. As a side note, as large amounts of the system will be written using the CLR, the whole system will be much more portable. With AMD and Intel going for different approaches to 64-bit chips, it looks like MS might manage to cut the chains tying them to one architecture with this one.
I've played with VS.NET a fair bit, and been rather impressed with it. As a programming environment it pretty much kicks all the other one's I've worked with into touch. The only problem I found was that because of the vast amount of power available, I felt like it was going to take me months (if not years) to become comfortable with a wide-enough range of the tools to know that I was using the right ones. I managed to make a start at using ADO/XML to store information before becoming completely mired in a lack of understanding of the basic principles of what I was supposed to be doing - all the documentation I've come across so far assumes that you were comfortable using previous versions of the MS systems.
The challenge, of course, is to find myself a position where I get to play with all of this at some point over the next couple of years. Time to start looking around to see which bits of the company will get to do this...
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Date: 2003-10-30 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-30 08:08 am (UTC)The good news: building web pages is a snap using Whidbey. The ASP.NET 2.0 system has some major improvements in building and maintaining sites (the one speaker said it reduces code by 66%). Longhorn has a unified contact list, which is finally making computers people-centric and community-centric. The line between "Windows" app and "Web" app is blurred to the point where you can create windows applications with a "Click-Once" installation program and these Windows apps can be connected asynchronously to Web Services, running in different modes depending on connection speed.
The bad news: this is pre-alpha code we're playing with. It's improved, but it's still a ways away.
The different news: Longhorn now has XAML, which is a declarative markup language that can be compiled and will generate a program. Like current ASP.NET, you can have codebehind pages in VB.NET or C# (or any CLR language) to handle events. These programs may be able to be transmitted on the web, which will result in a really rich web-based environment (if you're running Microsoft).
Info on the conference can be found here. A link to the new version of VS.NET can be found here.